Being Married to a Sex Addict is Not for the Weak

I knew pretty soon into our relationship that my husband was addicted to porn.

Let’s go back to the back beginning…

It’s 2006. I’m renting a room at my friend’s mom’s house. I start dating my then boyfriend (now husband). He comes over almost every night on his way home from work. We make dinner, we cuddle and watch a movie, we have sex, but then some nights, we don’t have sex and he acts weird about it. I don’t really think much of it. Things at the house start to go sour and I get evicted. I could have moved in with my sister, but instead, I moved in with my boyfriend at his mom’s house.

Within a month, I catch on to his porn habits. He spends an awfully long time in the bathroom, we’re talking an hour, sometimes more. One night, I take a shower while he’s in the guest room using the computer. When I come out of the shower, he’s not in the guest room, but the computer is still on with his last open web browser-porn. It is then that I catch on to the fact that he is watching porn before having sex with me. It is then I find his porn collection (actual dvds – hundreds of them). He says it’s ok to throw them away, I do. A few months later, I catch him again. He tells me, “You missed some dvds.”

A few months later, I’m working at the deli in a grocery store. I slice my finger open while slicing meat (haha). I don’t have my own car,  so I call him to ask him to take me to the hospital because I just nearly chopped my finger off. But he doesn’t answer. As I’m speaking with my manager, boyfriend’s mom happens to walk by. I call her name, “C, please help! Can you take me home so your kid can take me to the hospital?” She rushes me home, I run upstairs, but the bedroom door is locked. It takes several minutes before he opens the door, he is clearly *disheveled*. We go to the hospital where they can’t even stitch my finger because there’s nothing left to stitch (it kind of just sliced a big gouge off, picture a deli slicer shaving meat and that’s what I did to my finger. I didn’t lose the finger or anything, but they had to basically glue it shut. Fun stuff.) We get home, I make my way to our bedroom where I noticed the dvd tray is open – with a porno inside.

I start to notice that the porn he watches is kind of weird. Nothing alarming or illegal, but just…odd. I start to notice he doesn’t really want to have sex with me anymore. He spends hours in the bathroom every night when he gets home from work. I try to dress up for him, I try to initiate, I offer to role play, I offer to watch porn with him (he cried), but nothing works. We start having less and less sex, and when we do have sex he either cannot maintain an erection or he cannot finish. At this time, he is 21 years old. Too young to be having these issues, right?

This remains a problem for several years. We end up moving out of his mom’s house into our own apartment. He becomes more distant. He spends more time in the bathroom. When he gets caught, he becomes angry and shuts down. He refuses to discuss the problem. He refuses to talk about sex with me, like our own sex life. He doesn’t want to talk about what he likes or doesn’t like. I begin to wonder if something happened to him as a child. He says nothing ever happened that he recalls. This is when I really begin to feel like he must not be attracted to me at all. If he was into me, he wouldn’t need porn, he wouldn’t want porn because he has me. But the porn continues…gradually getting worse.

I start to notice that when we go out to eat, he disappears into the bathroom. 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there.

Road trips, he disappears into the bathroom for 30 minutes.

Parties at other people’s houses…into the bathroom.

Fast forward a few years. We’re living in a rented house now with a roommate. One day, we’re in Walmart buying dog food. As we near the checkout, I get a stabbing agonizing pain in my back. We go home, I take a hot bath, the back pain only gets worse. A few hours later when I can no longer stand the pain, I ask him to take me to the emergency room. We get there, I get checked in, I have to wait for them to check if I’m pregnant before they will administer any pain relief. I am throwing up from the pain. Boyfriend gets annoyed with how restless I am, so he goes outside to smoke. He is gone for a very long time. In the time he’s gone, they have taken me for an ultrasound and CT scan and I’ve been diagnosed with a 4 MM kidney stone. Several hours go by, I wake up after being knocked out from pain meds. He’s just walking back into the room when I wake up. I ask him if he’s been gone this whole time. He says “Yes. Shit, I didn’t realize I was out there that long. I dozed off for a little bit.” It was 2:00 AM at this point, so I didn’t really doubt him. But then a few days later when my brain starts functioning properly again, a little seed of doubt pops into my brain. Surely, he wouldn’t leave me alone in the ER for that long? So, I wait for him to fall asleep and then I snoop through his phone. And what do I find in his email? Links to a Craigslist ad he had posted (back when CL still had personals). The title of the ad? “Want your pussy”. I will never forget that line. And in the ad, he expressed what he was looking for and that he was “testing the waters”.

Over the years, he breaks up with me a few times to try to pursue other women. I always take him back.

Over the years, his porn preferences become more extreme. Again, nothing illegal. Just weird. He confesses to me that his biggest fantasy is to have a woman agree to get to fatter for him. He’s very into the feeder lifestyle. I’ve always been bigger, but not big enough for him.

Somehow, I still end up marrying him in 2014. After a few years of marriage, he agrees to get help once the real truth comes out. He confesses to me that he watches porn every chance he gets while he’s at work. He hopes that I will ask him to stop at the store or to bring home dinner on his drive home from work so that he can sneak into a public bathroom and watch porn before he comes home. If he’s in the bathroom for more than 10 minutes, he’s watching porn. If he has the day off while I’m at work, he spends the entire day watching porn. Hours upon hours of porn. He completely avoids household chores. He neglects the dogs. He doesn’t even masturbate. He just watches it. And if he does masturbate, he still has trouble staying hard or finishing. Or some days, he will orgasm over and over again. But when we have sex…he still can’t stay hard. He still can’t orgasm. He visits strip clubs every chance he gets. He spends money on cam girls.  He spends money on his sex addiction, but tells me I can’t buy myself lunch while I’m at work.

Despite all of that, I still stay. At this point, my self esteem doesn’t exist. I will never be hot like a porn star, I’ll never do the things they do, I’ll never be extreme like that, I’ll never be fat enough. I unintentionally allow myself to gain weight. He notices. He likes it. He becomes hyper fixated on it. He wants to buy me weight gain shakes, he wants to feed me while he have sex. I’m not into that…so he still watches porn, and he watches it more than he has sex with me. I get so desperate that I really lean into the weight gain, mostly just teasing him (the good kind of tease) so that he gets excited and has sex with me, but it’s obvious that’s not enough.

We put an app on his phone so that I can see whatever he’s looking at. He quickly figures out how to bypass it.

I still stay.

He promises to get help. He doesn’t.

I still stay.

He gets a prescription for Viagra at 35 years old. It doesn’t help.

He tells me maybe if I was more affectionate, he would want to have sex with me. Maybe if I didn’t push him away, he wouldn’t watch porn. He’s gaslighting me…

I still stay…

Fast forward to today…we are getting divorced. Not just because of porn, but because he is not a nice person to me. He has ruined my self esteem and I hate myself for allowing him to have that power. I hate that I was so fucking weak minded that I let him bully me into thinking I had to change myself to make him want me, only for him to still not want me. He swears he’s attracted to me, he loves my body, but he also knows that he wants me to be even bigger and never stop getting bigger. He doesn’t care about the health issues it would cause. He doesn’t care if it would actually kill me. All he cares about is his own satisfaction, but here’s the kicker – he will NEVER be satisfied!

And before anyone says anything, like “Oh, you’re just a prude, let the man watch porn” – NO. JUST NO. This man has cried real tears, sobbed down on his knees, telling me he knows he has a problem and he is filled with so much guilt and shame that he wants to die. He knows he needs help and he hates what this has done to our relationship. He hates that porn has ruled his life and he has wasted so much time on it. He  admits he has a problem, BUT he is unwilling to do anything about it.

I feel sorry for his new girlfriend, I really do. She might not catch on for a while. At first, she’s gonna be like “What’s a little porn hurt?”, but when he can’t get an erection, when he can’t have an orgasm…she’s going to start to wonder what’s wrong with HER. What is she doing wrong? Why isn’t he attracted to her? He is going to love bomb her so hard in the beginning, she’s going to fall for it, but the narcissist will be there waiting to show its face. I hope she has a bigger backbone than me. She is much smaller than me and I wonder how that’s going to work. He LOVES big women. Not just BBWs, but SSBBWS. He tried to get me to agree to be 450 pounds. I don’t weigh nearly that much and his new girlfriend is barely considered chubby.

We did almost get divorced in 2020. We were separated for a month, but then he reeled me back in. He dated a woman 15 years older than him during that time. She was skinny, but she had big, fake boobs. He told me when we got back together that he realized very quickly it would never work with her because she wasn’t big enough…so, what does he think is gonna happen with this new chick? She doesn’t seem like the type to be into the feeder lifestyle, but I guess you never know.

There is a lot I am leaving out because people don’t really need to know the gory details. I’m not going to spill the beans about the kind of porn he likes, aside from the big women/feeder part.

I don’t even know why I’m sharing this to the world. People are so divided over whether porn is good or bad. It’s one thing to watch to porn to get off once in a while, but when it consumes your life and interferes with your relationship, you might want to get help. Addiction affects everyone involved in a relationship. They say porn addiction is equal to heroin addiction. It’s one of the hardest to overcome. Porn also gives men (and women, I suppose) an unrealistic view of what sex is like between two consenting adults.

It’s hard for me to look back on all of this and realize that I enabled him. Every time I caught him and he got pissed off and gaslit me into apologizing to him when I did absolutely nothing wrong. I should have shut that down from day one…but I loved him. And he convinced me that he loved me in return. And now I am the one who will have to heal from this. The damage he’s done to my self esteem, my brain, my emotions. He spent almost 20 years brainwashing me. Good God, I hope it doesn’t take me 20 years to get over this shit.

I could ramble on and on about this topic, but I’ve already done that long enough, so I bid you farewell. Until next time.